


Trapped/Free

by Dain



Series: autistic tommy shepherd [2]
Category: Marvel, Young Avengers
Genre: Autistic Character, Depression, Gen, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 19:45:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2122407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dain/pseuds/Dain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He carries confinement with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trapped/Free

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this with the assumption that the readers hadn't read "Raw", so there's a bit of repetitiveness between the two pieces, and it's certainly not necessary to read "Raw" to understand this one. The mentions of self-harm are mostly references to past instances and/or stim-related.

He carries confinement with him.

It’s etched onto his arms in the dark lines and smudges that resulted from too much scratching with a staple. It’s in his jaw every time he catches himself biting on a knuckle or chewing on his fingers so hard that the skin around his nails is raw and bloody. It’s ever-present in his nightmares, and it seeps into the painfully numb space at the base of his ribcage when he finds himself, for whatever reason, sitting alone in the room he shares with Teddy, staring at the wall.

Being alone never leads to anything good, so Tommy surrounds himself with noise and people and tries to make life fun. Enjoyable, at least. And for the most part, he succeeds.

But there are always times when he ends up alone somewhere, sometimes aimlessly wandering deserted streets, sometimes curled loosely on the floor of his room when he can’t summon the energy to move. At these times, the most he can do is vibrate his fingers, or move them in circles too fast for snails to follow, just to remind himself that he’s not trapped, there is no power dampener, and he (technically) has the ability to stand up and walk out of the room.

He gets into the habit of bringing one of those pens that you have to twist to get the tip to come out with him whenever he can, twisting it back and forth when pressure starts building in his chest. He chews on them a little, too, trying to use the plastic as an alternative to skin, but he dislikes the taste. The constant twisting – usually faster than the pens were built to withstand – leads to needing a replacement every couple of days, and sometimes he has to give in and bite down on his arm, not hard enough to draw blood but enough to ground himself with the pain and relieve some of the pressure on his chest.

He’s tried to start chewing on pencils again but he just ends up breaking them, and some days he feels just the same as he had in his cell: tense and shaky, unable to use his usual methods of calming himself down. At least now he isn’t cut off from his powers, but even making his fingers dance in blurry patterns doesn’t work as well as it used to. It’s all a bit of a mess, but he tries to force himself to stay positive. He smirks and snarks for the benefit of the others, pretends that everything is just dandy, but the truth is that he’s still carrying his cell around with him and it’s becoming too heavy a load for him.

Tommy knows he’s autistic. Nothing formal’s ever been said about it, but he’s done his research. He knows. He’s not used to other people knowing, however – his parents either never noticed or never cared to think about it too deeply – so when Billy asks him if he knows why broken pens keep turning up everywhere, as if this were a totally normal and not at all potentially personal question to ask another human being, Tommy ends up doing nothing more than spluttering incoherently, denying that he did anything, and then promptly leaving.

Which, looking back, was probably not the smoothest way to handle that situation.

“I just need to keep my fingers busy,” Tommy says by way of explanation when he returns to the Kaplan house that evening. (He won’t realize until the next day that Billy probably had no idea that he was the reason pens kept breaking until he’d acted weird about it, but by then it’ll be too late, and Billy takes it in stride. Mostly.)

“So you…break pens.”

“I don’t _try_ to,” Tommy says, rolling his eyes. “But they’re, you know, not made for speedsters.”

“Uh-huh.” Billy seems to lose the thread of the conversation and Tommy gladly allows it to unravel. No need to keep trucking down that road. The whole issue seems to have been forgotten until, a couple weeks later, something kind of weird happens.

Billy gets him a present. Or something.

“It’s supposed to be good for people who like to spin things,” Billy offers. “And I fixed it up so it won’t wear out. Hopefully.”

Tommy has never in his life owned one of these tangle things, and it takes him a bit to get used to it. At first, the way it tends to stick is kind of annoying, but he soon realizes that the slight resistance it offers actually helps him disperse the knot of pressure in his chest quicker, and the fact that it’s coated in rubber makes it nice to chew on – though Tommy keeps this to himself. He feels weird about the chewing and he doesn’t think Billy knows about it, but he consoles himself with the fact that it’s easier to resist biting himself now. He still does it from time to time, especially around his fingernails, but he isn’t making himself bleed as often or leaving a lot of tooth marks on his arms anymore, so he counts it an improvement.

It occurs to him later that Billy probably had to do some research to find a stim toy, even a pretty typical one, and that Billy might know – but he thinks he’s actually okay with that. After all, Billy had gone out of his way to try and help him, and that had to count for something.

Tommy feels the walls of his cell begin to recede, bit by bit, and he wonders if maybe he’s doing the right thing, sticking around with these losers.


End file.
